“You’ll do what needs to be done to win this war,” I point out.
“But this vision wasn’t about open war. It was a duel. I would never breach the honor of a duel. And why would we duel, anyway? What would be the need? It makes no sense. How can what they saw possibly happen?”
“It can’t. And yet they saw it.”
His fists clench and unclench. I look down and see that mine are doing the same. “I can believe that we could be forced into a duel somehow,” he says, “I can wrap my head round that. But no one can force me to hurt you. I won’t be my sister’s killer.”
“I told Amba it wouldn’t come to pass. Swore it, in fact. Swore I wouldn’t die that way.”
Alexi smiles. “Good.”
I smile back, oddly comforted. The possibility of my blood on that grass is so much less terrifying now that I know there are two of us working against it. Loved by gods. Wasn’t that what Amba said we are? Surely there’s nothing, then, that we can’t do together?
“We should return,” Alexi says. “What shall we say we were doing all this time?”
“Arguing. We’ll say you tried to persuade me to join your cause so you could have Titania and I refused because of what our mother did to me, so we argued about the way I’ve betrayed our family. They’ll all believe that.”
When we return to the feast, it’s difficult to watch Alexi’s face shift into a more mutinous expression as soon as eyes of others can see us, but it’s necessary and I keep my posture just as stiff. Alexi marches off to find General Saka and Bear, and I go back to Max and Sybilla. I look back once, watching them go, my two brothers with copper in their hair and battle scars across their skin, and feel like a part of me has gone with them.
Sybilla raises her eyebrows at me. “That went well, then? Nice bit of family bonding?”
“Don’t ask.”
We leave early. The airchariot glides over the snow, sending clouds of white into the air, and a moon winks down at us from above. It’s a half joker moon, the moon that laughed when the god Gann slipped on a banana peel and was consequently punished with a curse. You will be the joker moon forevermore, the god said in the story. Only to appear when tricks are played and treachery is afoot. It’s bad luck to look at such a moon. I shiver and turn my face away.
We’re about ten minutes into the journey back to Erys when Titania informs us that there’s a screw loose in one of her controls. Max goes down to sort it out.
As soon as he’s out of earshot, Sybilla turns to me. “Are you going to leave us for your family?”
I’ve started to understand the sharpness in her voice, and I can see now that that curt, brittle tone is a layer she uses to cover her fear. “Of course not. What would I gain from joining my entitled brothers and the mother who literally threw me out of our home? If I went anywhere, it would be back to Wychstar, but I don’t plan on doing that anytime soon, either. And anyway, no matter where I went, I wouldn’t leave you. We’d still be friends, wouldn’t we?”
She nods, relieved, but we both know friendship wouldn’t make any difference if we had to face each other in battle.
Sybilla scuffs a boot against the floor, making Titania grumble. “I told Max we shouldn’t have let you go off with Alexi,” she admits.
“Did you both expect me to go with my brother and, what? Never come back?”
“We didn’t think you would. Just that you could.”
A question sticks in my throat, but I ask it anyway. “Does Max want me to go?”
“Between you and me,” she says, “I think he’d give almost anything for you to want to stay.”
I look away so that she can’t see the pain on my face. “I do want to stay.”
For more reasons than I dare admit even to myself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I let a couple weeks pass before I dare to fly Titania back to Winter.
It’s a quiet day with not much on the royal schedule. I sit with Grandmother in her decadent private suite, sipping spiced wine and nibbling on kaju sweets while some truly abysmal music wafts from the tune player, and listen to her plot new ways to skew the war votes in her favor. It seems to be as good a time as any to leave.
“Grandmother,” I say without ceremony, “I can’t listen to this awful music a moment longer. I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Rachki is not awful, you blasphemous whelp!” she shouts after me. “She was one of the greatest veena players of all time!”
“There’s a reason no one plays the bloody veena anymore,” I mutter under my breath.
There’s a comet shower deep in space. I have to wait for two engineers to finish a routine check on Titania, so I stand in the dock and watch the comets flash like fireworks over Kali.
That’s when I see them, the two shadows standing on a maintenance ledge just below the ceiling of the dock. I recognize Max’s profile. He seems at ease. The other shadow is unfamiliar. It looks like a man with stooped shoulders and a shock of hair.
Another mysterious visitor, never seen before, and probably never to be seen again.
I glance back at the engineers, one of whom raises both hands when she sees me looking. At least ten more minutes before Titania is ready.
There’s a spiral stairway at the far end of the dock. I should be able to use it to get within earshot of the shadows on the ledge. I climb quickly, higher and higher. As long as I stay beneath the level of the ledge, I should be able to get close without being spotted.
I reach the top of the stairway and press against the wall of the landing, a few feet beneath the ledge. Snatches of voices float down to me—
“Do you remember how angry I made him that day?” the old man asks. “I thought he’d break the sun in a fit of temper—”
“It wasn’t one of your better days. Mind you, it’s not as bad as some of the other tricks you’ve played in your time—”
The old man laughs, and Max joins in. I’m bewildered. Their conversation sounds so relaxed, so normal. Why the secrecy then?
“I keep wondering how much I’ve forgotten,” Max says, quiet now. “It feels like it’s all still there, at the back of my mind somewhere, but the human brain can only store so much.”
“Ah, but I’m always here to remind you of the pieces you’ve lost.”
I wonder if they’re talking about Max’s biological parents. If he’s afraid sometimes that he’s lost even his few memories of them. I wonder if the old man knew them.
“Were you ever going to tell me about Esmae and the blueflower?” the old man asks.
I freeze.
“Why would I?” Max says. “What difference does it make to you?”
The old man doesn’t answer that. “I saw her at the wedding. I saw the jewel in her hair. It looks like a gemstone, but it would be a travesty if I didn’t know a blueflower when I saw one. I assume Amba blessed it before she gave it to her? Turned it into armor?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“Is there a particular reason you won’t talk to me about this?”
“I’m not going to talk about Esmae.” Max’s voice is still friendly but implacable.
Unnerved, I flee down the stairway before I can be discovered. I don’t know what to make of what I’ve just heard. I’ve always suspected that Max must have guessed about the blueflower at some point, but I have no idea why the old man is so interested in it, not to mention the fact that I’ve never seen him before, yet he has apparently been so close to me that he was able to spot a jewel in my hair.
I climb aboard Titania, still feeling troubled. She, of course, notices. “What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s not important. Can you put a call in to King Ralf’s palace and ask for Princess Katya?”
“I didn’t know Alexi changed his name,” Titania says, dry as dust. I laugh.
When Princess Katya answers, I choose my words carefully in case anyone on Kali has intercepted the signal. “I’m at a loose end today and thought I’d take you up
on your very kind offer to explore Blackforest. Are you free?”
“Of course!” she says enthusiastically, just the tiniest gurgle of mirth in her voice. “It would be my pleasure. Let me send you the coordinates of one of my favorite spots and I’ll meet you there.”
The coordinates she sends are, of course, in the new territory now known as Arcadia.
“Can you cloak us so that no one will know which part of the planet we’ve gone to?” I ask Titania.
“Already done. And the engineers will check my past journey logs, but they’ll only see the coordinates I wish them to see.”
She rises into the air and zips out of the dock. As we fly, she tells me about the newest book she downloaded from the tech library, a fascinating story about seven minor gods who were reborn as mortals as punishment for a crime.
“Do you miss Wychstar?” I ask her when she’s finished.
“I don’t know,” she says, “What does it feel like, missing something?”
I don’t know how to give words to such a feeling, so I ask a different question. “Do you know why King Darshan wanted Alexi to win you?”
“I know he wanted Alexi to know he had set up the competition for him,” she says. “He wanted Alexi to be grateful. Darshan wanted to ask favor of your brother and wanted him to feel unable to refuse.”
“What was the favor?”
“I don’t know.”
What could Alexi have given Darshan that no one else in the world could? “I do know this much,” Titania says. “He was very upset when you won me instead. He considered asking you for the favor, but decided in the end that because you would not feel the same gratitude Alexi did, you would be unlikely to grant it.”
It’s a favor he believed either of us were capable of granting. So then what do I have in common with Alexi that no one else does?
While I think about it, Titania says, “The goddess Amba is fond of you, isn’t she? She was one of the gods who made me.”
This is news to me, but it does make perfect sense. Why wouldn’t a war goddess contribute to the creation of an unbeatable, unbreakable warship?
“Why do you want to know if she’s fond of me?” I ask.
“No reason.”
“Which means there’s a reason. Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“We chat sometimes,” Titania explains, “and she speaks of you in the tone of one who is fond. That’s all.”
I can’t help feeling disquieted by this. Regular conversations between a war goddess and a sentient warship can’t possibly bode well.
“Look!” Titania practically shrieks, making me jump. “We’re here!”
It’s a good distraction, I’ll give her that. I drop the subject of Amba and cross to the glass to gaze down.
The first thing I notice is how green Arcadia is under patchy layers of snow and ice. It’s a lush paradise, simultaneously rustic and modern, with forests and rolling hills. The palace is small and spiky, half-hidden by the woods around it, and the city is a maze of reddish rooftops, cobbled roads, smoky chimneys, airchariots, and armorers’ workshops. The fields are dotted with sheep, cows, and farms. There are sentries and riverships and spaceships and a nearly invisible shield around the palace.
It’s beautiful, peaceful, and very carefully guarded.
A small river twists across the city and vanishes into the yellow woods on the western border. Titania flies there, then swoops low to find a spot to land beneath the drooping, weeping trees.
“Be careful,” she says. But the way she says it makes me wonder if Amba has told her of the prophecy.
I pick up a coat, open an exit hatch, and climb onto Titania’s wing. There’s a sharp, icy nip in the air. I cock my head and listen, then recognize what sounds like Bear’s voice in the trees about twenty yards away. I jump off the wing, put my coat on over my inadequate summer dress, and follow the voice.
I find them by the river, just my brothers, barefoot with their trouser legs rolled up like they’re children on a fishing trip. Bear has a staff in his hand.
I swallow down my nerves, toe off each of my boots, and try not to wince as I curl my feet into the icy grass. “And what are we doing?”
Bear bounds toward me, all boyish enthusiasm. “I’m so glad you came,” he says, unceremoniously thrusting the staff in my direction. “Here. Let’s spar.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Alexi warns him.
I give him an annoyed look. “Don’t write me off just because I’m smaller than he is.”
Alexi’s amused. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”
His words surprise a laugh out of me, but Bear is deeply offended and grumbles about being treated like the baby of the family.
“Why are we barefoot?” I ask. “Not that I’m complaining. Except I am. I can’t feel my toes anymore.”
“Come here,” Alexi says.
I approach him. He’s standing on a rock next to the water. This isn’t the river I saw disappear into the woods from above; it’s a deep pool. Steam rises from the surface.
“A hot spring?”
“They’re all over Winter,” he explains. He sits down on the rock and kicks his bare feet in the water.
I tentatively do the same and yelp when the heat hits my near-frozen feet. “Do you come here often?”
“It’s our favorite place in the city,” he says.
I stare at his profile for a moment. I don’t know if it means anything that they invited me to their favorite spot, but I’m touched all the same.
Bear joins us, bringing bottles of fruit ale. He hands me one and opens his own with his teeth. “I forgot the honey cakes,” he says. “They’re in the box under the tree, Alex.”
Alexi rolls his eyes and goes off to find the sweets. As soon as he’s out of earshot, Bear drops his voice to a whisper: “You haven’t been drinking the wine, have you?”
“Of course not.” So Alexi doesn’t know. Neither Bear nor our mother has told Alexi of her plans. Because his honor wouldn’t abide it? Because he’d try to stop her? “I’m not sure it matters, anyway. Max tests every bottle of wine and every dish served. He keeps a syringe full of stasis serum with him at all times so that he can save Elvar’s life if the poison does make its way in. Whoever has been helping our mother will have seen how careful he’s been. They’ve probably already told her that poison is a waste of time.”
“Just stay away from the wine anyway,” says Bear stubbornly.
Alexi returns with the honey cakes. He gives me one, and when I taste it, the warmth and moisture floods my mouth. He grins at the joy on my face. “There’s a local woman who makes them. Bear visits her at least three times a week to replenish his supply.”
“Can you blame me?” Bear demands, except it sounds more like caoobaymee through the cake stuffed in his mouth.
I eat the crumbly edges of the honey cake first, then swallow the moist middle whole. I glance at Alexi in time to see him do exactly the same. He notices, too, and quickly looks away.
I give them my latest updates from the war council, including details of a plan to intercept one of Alexi’s supply ships. It’s frustratingly not quite what we need. Without open war, the council’s current plans are mostly defensive, with a little trickery thrown in for good measure: reinforce this part of the perimeter; reach out to this ally; cut that supply route. Nothing I can use to end the war altogether. The names of spies are helpful, of course, but even the war council doesn’t discuss those details openly, and there’s a great deal I still don’t know. I need to get more out of Elvar, but trust takes time and, despite his fondness for me, he hasn’t yet revealed any convenient dark secrets. Perhaps he doesn’t have any.
Once we’ve hashed the subject of war to death, we fall into awkward stilted conversation that gradually flows more easily. We talk of our childhoods—I tell them about Wychstar and they tell me about our father. We talk about places we’d like to visit, our favorite battle formations, our favorite weapons. Mine’s my
bow, Alexi’s is his, and Bear’s is his mace.
At some point, and with some difficulty, I ask about our mother.
“She’s fine. She keeps herself busy.”
“Would she see me if I asked?” I want to kick myself for the tiny note of hope in my voice.
They shake their heads. “Sorry, Esmae,” Bear says, looking as ashamed as if he were personally responsible for her choices. “She refused to come with us today. She was wild as fire when she found out we were coming. She thinks we should have nothing to do with—”
“I think Esmae’s gotten the idea.”
Bear darts a guilty look my way. I rub my nose to hide how deeply his words have cut into my heart. “It’s fine,” I lie.
I finish my bottle of fruit ale and a few more honey cakes. The sun, so harsh and real, creeps lower in the sky. The ground is utterly still. I find myself missing the engines and spiky towers and colored skies of Kali. I think of how I’ll return to Erys today and how my brothers won’t. They’ll stay here, with real sunsets and natural forests and ground under their feet that doesn’t constantly thrum. They’ll stay here with our mother. They get her, I get Kali.
And we’ll all feel the desperate ache of what we can’t have.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Max’s dark head is bent over an object on the desk. I look over his shoulder and see that it’s an old-fashioned sort of clock, dismantled. He has a knack with machines that he doesn’t have with bows and arrows. Sometimes I think that in spite of all the bloodshed and betrayal littered across his past, he’s better at putting things together than he is at ripping them apart.
I watch the way he coils a copper wire around his thumb to keep it in place. Unexpectedly, I think of a lock of my coppery hair twined around his fingers that way.
Does Max want me to go?
I think he’d give almost anything for you to want to stay.
The memory keeps pushing itself to the forefront of my mind, filling me with guilt and hope and wanting every time. It’s as absurd as it is infuriating. Of all the people in all the worlds, why is he the one I want?